I was wondering how dependant everyone is on X. Can you happily live in an 80 column world or do you need point and click to feel secure? I'm not asking how much you like X. I love eyecandy as much as anyone but that's not the issue here. The question is can you function solely on the command line or not.

Can you happily live in an 80 column world or do you need point and click to feel secure?

80 columns have nothing to do with point and click for me. I like having several windows availabe at the same time. Surf, a couple/few xterms to manage files. Usually one as root, and 1 or 2 as a user. An IM client and sometimes a music playing program (thought lately I've just been using the command line for that). For my use at home, console mode is not functional enough. I use fluxbox, so the 'eye candy' is minimal. Most everything I do is command line oriented (excluding apps tha are gui only). I prefer vi as an editor, and rarely use GUI file managers (they seem cumbersome). At work, I found the GUI to be more of an irritation than useful depending on the task. Regular events occurred that all but made a GUI necessary (yes, a matter of convenience). Logs were monitored in real time along with other tasks. Switching terminals would not have been practical._________________It takes a little while to get the facts. You still don't know the facts.

I like the "eye-candy", but as far as needing it, no. I'm like trying other apps, but I would function fine using mutt, bitchx, w3m, and the like. Have been stuck there many times before after breaking X and not wanting to take the time to get it to work.

Oh, and I just use Sawfish with a couple different apps, so my eye-candy probably means less than the next guys.

Can you happily live in an 80 column world or do you need point and click to feel secure?

It amuses me when people equate "GUI" with "less-capable" and draw conclusions that people who use GUIs must be somehow weaker because of it.

Command line is great for a lot of things. No question about it. But, for a fair number of things, GUI is the only way to go. Web browsing is the most obvious example. How about graphic design? Video editing?

Personally, I use the CLI for most of the sysadmin tasks that I perform. For day-to-day tasks, however, such as reading email, working on spreadsheets, etc. I far prefer the GUI.

Maybe that means I'm "insecure" with just the CLI. Oh well -- I can live with that.

--kurt_________________The problem with political jokes is that they get elected

It amuses me when people equate "GUI" with "less-capable" and draw conclusions that people who use GUIs must be somehow weaker because of it.

Well, what got me thinking about this is that I spend a lot of my time remotely sshed into my home box and it's kinda a question of if you'd know how to check mail without Evolution or KMail and if you could manipulate files and do searches without Nautilus or Gentoo or Konqueror. The same things can be done in both the GUI and CLI worlds so one isn't less-capable than the other. This is a question for multiple OSes, too. I know plenty of windows users who have never seen a DOS prompt and wouldn't know what to do if they were at one...even though that's different because I don't know of any DOS mail programs.

Pedantics aside, my point is that drawing conclusions about a user's computer competence based upon their preferred method of interacting with their computer is asinine.

So what if someone doesn't know all the switches and options to make their linux box dance to their CLI tune. Does that mean we're better than they are? Are they somehow inferior because they prefer a graphical interface?

Don't get me wrong -- there are lots of reasons why I don't like GUIs in various situations. But just because I'm comfortable using a CLI doesn't mean I think I'm any better than the guy using a GUI down the street.

It's attitudes like that that give linux users a bad reputation...

--kurt_________________The problem with political jokes is that they get elected

The MCSE down the street uses a GUI... they are frequently thought of asa being lesser beings . Of course, depends on the MCSE._________________It takes a little while to get the facts. You still don't know the facts.

BTW: It wasn't meant as an offence. OK, for now I am using pine, but as soon as we get new computers I will also switch to KMail since it will be much faster in accessing many, many mails in several different categories.

I love CLI. That's one reason i switched to *NIX. You can't live at the CLI in windoze. (However the run box was a nice feature). I only need the gui for graphical web pages (porn) and gimp. Also a lot of things are made easier by a GUI, such as audio players, email, irc, and browsing most pages (i do have a soft spot for lynx). Plus its nice to have multiple eterms.

So in short, i like X, but would only miss it for grafx apps and porn. Otherwise i'd be fine in CLI. Also Atl+Tab is more convinent than Ctrl+Alt+F?

I like the eye candy, but since my first computer was a command liner, I feel more at home there..._________________"And I'm right. I'm always right, but in this case I'm just a bit more right than I usually am." - Linus Torvalds

It's kinda a question of if you'd know how to check mail without Evolution or KMail and if you could manipulate files and do searches without Nautilus or Gentoo or Konqueror

Well, of course I can check my mail with mutt. What bothers me though is that there's no way (that I know of) to get at my KMail folders from the CLI. So if I'm at school and don't want to run KMail remotely, there's no way to see the mail in my KMail folders. Or my appointments in Evolution or KOrganizer. Sorry, not really relevent, just a personal gripe I have.

BTW - Why does everyone say filemanagement is faster on the command line? I've always found tools like konqueror and nautilus to be much more efficent.

Also, some tools aren't easily available on the command line- command line irc clients, instant messangers, image editors and web-browsers aren't as capable as their X counter-parts. Pressing the "Rip+Encode" button in grip is easier than the commands I'd have to use to do the same thing in a console.

Quake3 only runs in X. To use nvidia's drivers under quake 2 means using X. (and my mouse is broken under svga- but that's just because I never bothered to set it up right)

To sum it up... X and a CLI are just parts of the whole with linux. To be truly adept with All Things Linux you need to be comfortable with both.

I've started doing a lot of non-linear video editing work on Gentoo -- trust me, you can't do this stuff at a command line. Visual feedback when you do this kind of stuff is IMPERATIVE. (Well, I'd expect it to be, since video, is, well, rather visual in nature...)

I also do a fair bit of C++, and it's still nice to have X around for that. I've switched out of KDE-exclusive mode to take advantage of the freedom-of-choice philosophy of X, so these days I usually hop between KDE, fluxbox, and fvwm. The performance hit with the latter two is practically non-existent, and it helps -so- much to have 7 or 8 windows on the current situation -- a few for code, a couple for a test case, one for an attached gdb...

As other people have said, it is a matter of convenience, not of capability. Next somebody will probably be telling me that graphics artists are somehow "dumber" than other people because they require a GUI to do their work, or that programmers who prefer to work in X are "dumber" because they find switching terminals to be inconvenient.

i do command line for most things (like all my filemangement needs). But i really like having a grphical mail client, etc. And something just don't work to well under command line. Oh, of course i have to play quake : )

80 colums?!?!?!?!
Try like alot of colums, frame buffer baby!
I like X, but I can't find a wm that I like. I have found fvwm, I like it, I just need to figure out how to config it to look like http://www.fvwm.org/screenshots/Mikhael-desk-1280x1024.png
Opengl is much more fun when you have X so is quake / rtcw / counter-strike / unreal .... etc...

I like a CLI in linux because there's no really solid gui toolset that everyone uses. The CLI is more uniform. It's great to be able to use if you need to for some reason like setting up a firewall or installing gentoo. Don't get me wrong; I don't think that gui users are lesser beings. I just think that being able to use the CLI is a very handy tool._________________if i never try anything, i never learn anything..
if i never take a risk, i stay where i am..

I like the GUI.
It can be pretty and very useful.
There is no conflict between using the command line and enjoying a nice GUI. If you think otherwise, you are too 1337 and haven''t understood a thing.

I use the GUI for all my work, but Konsole is an important part of it.
Using Emacs for everything just because it is Emacs and not a GUI is a sort of elitist thinking that does computing and Linux no good.

I personally like both at the same time. I open X, have as many terms as I want open right alongside Phoenix and any other graphical apps I want to run. The best of both worlds, without anything given up.

If I need to have a "fullscreen" text application, I just do ctrl-alt-F2, log in and run it.

I run WindowMaker, also... very light on resources and I hardly ever touch swap. (512mb ram, I would hope not)

Dear god, I think that man is against everything.
Read his webpage (you have linked there) and you might even find two different views of the same story, each with a petition attached to it!
(I'm joking of course, but I wouldn't doubt it...)